OTU Only: Preventing terrorism or war sabotage

[Quint]

For me, this stuff is gold.

Excellent! I'm glad to help!

Jesus... just typing this I'm all, "I want to a build a subsector just for this scenario!" with a hunt across the worlds to put down the mother▮▮▮▮▮▮ers who did this. Like, right now.

This is some great stuff for story, setting, and RPG adventures.

That was essentially what happened in that campaign, a related campaign had essentially the Carbon Plague from CP2020 start, with the party playing the part of the Imperial "Wildfire" protocol that also locked things down in an effort to contain and understand it...

For me, as I've been thinking this through (again, it's been a few years since I ran that game) I think the key part is a matter of scale. Perhaps it is understanding that on an interstellar scale, nukes are certainly bad, but that they are almost the equivalent of a really big car bomb. With Nuclear Dampers, anti-radiation meds, etc while it certainly is a "bad thing" it isn't quite the threat that it is now.

So the Rockdrop scenario almost falls into two categories - the Nightmare, "Ellie Scenario" (from E.L.E. "Extinction Level Event") that destroys a world, and the "Crater City Scenario" where someone drops a rock and wipes a city off the map.

As we've noted in the discussion, getting the size and velocity needed for the "Ellie Scenario" is harder rather than easier. I expect (and recall from way back when I computed things) that what's needed for "Crater City" is a heck of a lot less.

(Unless, of course, you get ahold of whatever Black Project superweapon that the Imperium has stashed in one of their Megiddo Depots in deep space - then all bets are off. You're talking Osmium Bolt Projectiles mounted inside small craft shells with multistage high-thrust systems, reactive and ablative armor, along with weasel missile drones to draw off fire and project a false target trail...)

Amusingly, I don't actually think that even these "Nightmare Scenarios" are what keep the Intelligence up at night like their equivalents do ours. What has them utterly terrified is somebody finding an Ancient weapon that they have no idea of how to counter. Not even a planet-destroying superweapon, even just some kind of goofy tech that accidently gets used as a weapon, or an actual weapon that ignores everything - Relativity Guns, Stellar Igniters, Singularity Generators, etc.

That's the real mission of the Ancient's Foundation IMTU and why it's under the sponsorship of the Imperial Family - investigating and searching for the next Black Globe cache.

D.

 

[Timerover51]

Amusingly, I don't actually think that even these "Nightmare Scenarios" are what keep the Intelligence up at night like their equivalents do ours.

What keeps Real World Intel types up at night with nightmares are the creative, homegrown, "lone wolf" attacks by someone who thinks outside of the normal box.

 

[Quint]

What keeps Real World Intel types up at night with nightmares are the creative, homegrown, "lone wolf" attacks by someone who thinks outside of the normal box.

Yup, and due to the nature of Black Swan events it's an unwinnable scenario. Once the Intel Guy thinks of it, it's quantifiable, study able, and even if it isn't preventable or such a long shot that not much effort is put into preventing it, somebody somewhere has spent some time thinking about the aftereffects and how to recover.

The Black Swan event is, by definition, something that was for all intents and purposes, "never seen coming" (even if it was logical). Perhaps that is the point of the Crater City Scenario or even the Ellie Scenario.

Yes, everyone in the Imperium knows that it's possible to do it, but literally nobody takes the possibility seriously. Terrorists have so many better ways to create terror, bioplages, hacking the Imperialnet, shuttlebombs, etc. The idea might simply be so "low tech" that nobody really considers it anymore - until the Rachele Society drives a 5kton freighter loaded with radioactive ore into Rhylanor Downport...

Or...

Just like in the film The Rock a bunch of disaffected Imperial military types attempt blackmail using a superweapon (or, frankly, just a bunch of Argon Blue-ish Imperial lockout codes to override normal security procedures) and the whole thing goes horribly, horribly wrong - unless the player characters can stop them!

D.

 

[Timerover51]

Once the Intel Guy thinks of it, it's quantifiable, study able, and even if it isn't preventable or such a long shot that not much effort is put into preventing it, somebody somewhere has spent some time thinking about the aftereffects and how to recover.

D.

Unless the Intel guy gets ripped for coming up with impossible to stop, long shot activities, and gets told to quit coming up with them.

 

[Blue Ghost]

As to antimatter being in the game rules now... In the 1982 Dr Who story "Earthshock" the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was a freighter with an antimatter "bottle" being aimed at the Earth ( and, obviously, achieving impact). So it has been imagined.

But the point I was trying to make is that anti-matter is an "uber fuel" that lets you travel for years and years without refueling. Therefore, if you were a terrorist with an antimatter ship, it would just be a matter of packing food, water and air to carry out your attack.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

What if...

Some interesting ideas coming out in this thread. My 2Cr.


Terrorists have Budgets too!

Most fiction when creating a villain ignores the costs involved in setting up and mounting a terrorist attack.

It takes money to buy or rent a ship, find and train a crew (if your mode of attack is the ship you'll have no return, indeed even if it isn't, I'd advise getting rid of the ship as it's evidence). Then the cost of finding and setting an asteroid on a terminal course. Whatever you're chosen method of attack it's going to cost you.

It'll require cash, more cash than the equivalent civilian undertaking. Now none of the costs involved are insurmountable in the Traveller universe but like asteroid mining or a free trader campaign, its something that has to be taken into account.

There's a well known axiom in law enforcement and investigation: follow the money.

What if in an age where interstellar banking is mostly digital, the Imperial intelligence agencies keep tabs on your banking activity. What if when you send a large money transfer via X-Boat it sets off a flag with the IISS intelligence division financial crime branch?

What if one of the things those customs patrols are looking for is large amounts of cash being moved around?

When you file a flight plan with the SPA, does it and all your other movements get analysed to see if you're making suspicious trips?

Also there's a suite of measures that any government can use to prevent or even control terrorism. The undercover agent, the spy, the turncoat and the agent provocateur. all these come under the heading of human intelligence and are used to compromise the terrorist network.

A successful empire should identify terrorist threats early and slip their own people into the organization, because it can't really hurt you if you control it.

say, what if somebody just up and spilled a whole bunch of ImpSec secrets on a public ImpNet node telling bad people how to bypass our formerly secret data-mining ops? Smooth move, rookie! Back to the Academy for you, bunkie, straight to Security 101. :nonono:

Somebody get the Big White Flashie set up and make sure the techs get the off-site back ups...

 

[simonh]

This... I don't know what you're doing to my point, but let me try to make this clear:

You said that if such a horrible attack is possible, the game is only about that.
I point out that in our world horrible attacks are possible and that there are plenty of concerns about much smaller attacks as well.
Which, I think, demolishes the point that if really horrible attacks are possible, everything becomes about that one kind of attack.

That's all I was addressing.

Do you disagree with that point?

Not everything no, that would be silly. I hadn't really expected anyone to take it that literally. But if it is allowed as a possibility in the setting, how can it not have deep consequences for the setting? Small time crooks in the real world don't have continent busting power at their disposal. If they did, I think that would have important consequences for any game played in that setting. Do you think that is incorrect?

That's why I prefer to take that possibility off the table. It's an annoying distraction that I'd rather not have to deal with.

Simon Hibbs

 

[McPerth]

Some interesting ideas coming out in this thread. My 2Cr.


Terrorists have Budgets too!

Most fiction when creating a villain ignores the costs involved in setting up and mounting a terrorist attack.

And even more important, Terrorists have political goals too.

Terrorists are usually not the mad men that want to destroy everything and cause wanton destruction, but are people that fights for a goal, and they need popular support if they want to keep their fight.

Such attrocities use to alienate people from them, and so be self destroying for their cause (whatever could it be), only the most fanatic simpathizers accepting them as "necessary evil". And Imperial propaganda apparatus is stong enough to take the most advantage of this loss of popularity...

I guess that's the main brake to such attrocities being commited.

 

[Reban]

say, what if somebody just up and spilled a whole bunch of ImpSec secrets on a public ImpNet node telling bad people how to bypass our formerly secret data-mining ops? Smooth move, rookie! Back to the Academy for you, bunkie, straight to Security 101. :nonono:

Somebody get the Big White Flashie set up and make sure the techs get the off-site back ups...

Hmmm you know if I was Ine Gvar and saw all these "secrets" flushed into the open I'd start double thinking this as a set up.

But maybe they're showing me plan A so I'll think they're using plan B but in fact there was only plan A all along.

The life of one man's freedom fighter is a life of paranoia and bug out plans. :coffeesip:



Oh yeah and don't forget the Imperium has multiple intelligence agencies who probably spend as much time spying on each other as watching those guys planning to crash ships or rocks on your neighborhood.



Our colleagues in the WH40K Universe (wh40k.lexicanum.com) have a take on why its not that easy to drop a rock from space thats well worth a read